Friday, April 20, 2007

Plain Tales from British India

From William Dalrymple at the NY Review of Books

Niall Ferguson's deeply controversial—if impressively eloquent—celebration of the British Empire and what he sees as its central role in the spread of capitalism, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was first published in 2003, the same year that the US went into Iraq ... Partly as a result of Ferguson's work ... Academic discussions on Lawrence of Arabia's views on Iraq, the revolt of the Mahdi in Khartoum, the British Mandate in Palestine, and the Wahhabi Uprisings of the North-West Frontier have all taken on an entirely new importance as perspectives changed in the light of recent horrors in Baghdad, Falluja, Darfur, Gaza, and Kabul. Postcolonial studies were always a heavily politicized and angrily polemical academic field, but after September 11 they became a central focus of protest against American foreign policy ... The study of imperialism, in short, was suddenly about the present as much as the past.

No comments: